Crime and Punishment

Another year, another essential novel ticked off the list. It has become my aim to start each new year of my life with a book that I really should have read by now, no matter how long a read. 2019 kicked off 150 years in the past, with Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, a seminal work in that vast ocean of Russian literature so unexplored by me.

I was actually not unfamiliar with Dostoevsky's works going into it, having read a short story collection, you guessed it, somewhere between the ages of 16 and 18. Two stuck in my mind: White Nights and its heartbreaking depictions of loneliness, and The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, a nihilistic examination into human nature. Crime and Punishment is quite substantially longer and more developed, but manages to draw on similar themes.

Written after the author had returned from exile in Siberia, the novel follows the misfortunes of Rodion Raskolnikov (or is it Rodya? Every character has at least two names used interchangeably, which took some getting used to) as he grapples with the turmoil of his own mind. Initially suffering from delusions of grandeur, he convinces himself that murder for the purpose of stealing money could be the catalyst that gets him out of his impoverished student life and on the way to the fame and fortune that he deserves. But having committed the titular crime, the resulting guilt and anxiety send him into a nervous breakdown as he fears capture and debates whether to confess. With the room of a full novel to breathe, Dostoevsky's prose finds opportunity to wander and the result is an often excruciating, relentless cascade of inner monologues. Everyone, it seems, has something to hide or something to prove in the claustrophobic yet impersonal city of St. Petersburg.

If this all sounds a bit heavy, well, it was a lot of the time; after all, we're dealing with some serious subject matter. But it's kept afloat by the writing. Thanks to an adventurous translation (I couldn't help but smile at characters threatening to "brain" each other), it's still an easier read than most of what was written around that time - looking at you, Dickens - and Dostoevsky ramps up the sensationalism and plot twists throughout. The dialogue is just brilliant at times ("you trashy Prussian chicken leg in a crinoline" is my line of the year already), we're treated to probably the best account of the hangover-induced "fear" ever committed to paper, and the series of love triangles, blackmailing and subterfuge that make up the secondary plots are worthy of kitchen sink drama.

And if all this sounds fun, well, it was a lot of the time. But I couldn't help feeling that there was something about this book that held me back from fully enjoying or appreciating it. It dawned on me about two-thirds of the way through, in fact: this is a novel about a time in a place that I will never truly be able to identify with. It's Russia, in all its grim glory: arrogance and alcoholism, poverty and pretension, hunger and God, political engagement and the revolutionary spirit. Crime and punishment - punishment being the very real threat of hard labour in Siberia. Communism, communism, communism - although it was still 50 years or so from becoming a reality, the foundations are clear to see in the ideas of many of the characters. It's an existence that I, in my detached house in the comfortable Anglo-sphere, will never have to endure. And unfortunately, while I was able to appreciate Crime and Punishment as a great piece of writing, there was always that detachment.

I won't give up on the Russian classics just yet - there's a lot out there and Anna Karenina beckons - but Crime and Punishment didn't quite top the list.

4/5

WITH RUSSIA FROM LOVE